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Monday, January 20, 2014

Booked Beautiful: Turning a classic into artwork

As I mentioned in my post last Monday, Booked Beautiful will be a weekly post dedicated to all things crafty, decorative, or fun that has been made of or inspired by books.

My amazing husband knows how much I love Pride and Prejudice, so he created this wonderful art for our bedroom. If you are out there and still not sure of what to get your bookish loved one for valentines day, try this project out! I am so in love with this.

Now I am going to give you to Richie so he can tell you how to make this project, and how he got the idea.

I will see you next week with a new Booked Beautiful project.

So, I am nearly addicted to Pinterest. I have boards for gardening, food, home improvement/decorating, quotes, etc. I love to kill time repining things. That is where the idea for this came from. I had seen the quote all over Pinterest, and knew how much my wife loves Pride and Prejudice. I’m not sure if I had seen this exact project, but maybe the combination of several different things culminated in this.

I used a pair of canvases that I purchased at Hobby Lobby. They were around $8 and with a coupon there were so much less. The chipboard letters (pictured below) also came from there. The letters are a 4” typewriter font.

I covered the canvases with pages from the copy of P&P I bought used at 2nd & Charles. The pages were slightly yellowing and oldish looking. Which was great cause I didn’t have to age the pages at all (which I would have done using either tea or diluted brown paint). It took about 100 pages to cover the canvases. Using Aileen’s Tacky Glue (they ONLY craft glue you’ll ever need…this stuff is amazing!) thinned with water I decoupaged the pages haphazardly. Then let it dry. It has to be completely dry!

Lay the letters out to get a good estimate of how much space you’ll need and for approximate placement. The letterset only comes with one of each letter, so you’ll have to fake a little bit here and there on the layout. Trace them with pencil. Make sure it’s dark enough to see, but not too dark. Once they’re all traced, get the black paint ready. Put a little water in a bowl/glass/cup and squeeze black paint into it. Using a small paint brush, paint in the letters. The key here is to dip the brush into different parts of the glass—using the actual paint, and the thinned parts—to achieve whatever look you want. Remember, you can always add more paint to the letters, but its nearly impossible to remove.